Monday Cup Of Links #38 - Afro-Indian Lawmaker, Historical History Books, Polymath Courtiers from Vijayanagar.
A generous helping of "Why didn't they teach me these cool things in History class?"
Happy Monday!
This week has been more productive than prior ones, for sure. I’ve managed to finagle 4000 more words into my novel. I’m now squarely past the Point Of No Return, when my characters realize they are squarely on the radar of Scotland Yard, and the action escalates on both sides, leading to wins, tragedies, death, and prison.
This part is pretty rich in events. The unsettling bit for me is now more than ever, my novel feels like a collection of anecdotes rather than a coherent narrative. But I can’t do much about that until I’m done with my first draft. Which is motivation to finish it off, but it does play on my mind.
Onto our links!
Did you know that the popular hymn Krishna nee begane baarowas composed by a courtier of King Krishnadevaraya? Apparently it’s common knowledge to some, but I only learned about it last week! The composer Vyasatirtha was a polymath - was a monk, composed eternal songs that are still getting remixed 500+ years later, was a diplomat to several kingdoms, and pioneered several large irrigation projects for the kingdom! The more I learn about the Vijayanagar empire and how its influence was so long-standing and pervasive, the more I’m incensed at how this isn’t popular knowledge, and isn’t even taught in schools much.
Why is this such a big deal to me? Imagine learning that Happy Birthday was composed by, idk, Queen Elizabeth I. And no one told you that , and when you discovered it to be so, people said “Oh, you didn’t know?”Nearly everyone who reads Nature, the premier peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal, discovered to their dismay that certain columns in the journal are ‘sponsored’, and in those columns, you can’t write anything critical of the sponsor! Dr. Kenneth Witwer, an RNA expert, was invited to write a piece for the Outlook section. He was asked to make edits to his piece because some of it was critical of Nanjing University, the sponsor! When he refused to, they just went ahead and did it themselves! In times of a global pandemic where people are refusing to listen to science and reason, it doesn’t help to have a major source of new research that pervades the popular consciousness be beholden to sponsors and other ideological/economical controls.
ICYMI: My Thursday novel extract, Rabble Rousers Under The Shamiana. This is in the backdrop of the 50th anniversary of the 1857 War of Independence in London, where the British are holding somber memorials for their martyrs, which isn’t taken well by the Indian diaspora in London, who counter it with their own commemoration of the war and their own martyrs. Of course, there’s a gentleman, presumably from Scotland Yard, taking note of the celebration, and the folks providing security worrying if he might cause trouble.
There’s these two volumes of The History Of Mysore by a Colonel Mark Wilks, which was first published in 1810. Here’s Vol 1, and here’s Vol 2. I’ve only looked through it a little, but I’m just intrigued by all the esoteric spellings of places in the Mysore State. Saavanadurga is Savendoorg, the kingdom to the north are the ‘Mahrattas’, and the language in the Mysore kingdom is ‘Canarese’, as opposed to Kannada. This was compiled before 1857, so I’m intrigued to read how people viewed history and contemporary times before then.
The microscopic Siddi community gets its first legislator! The Siddis are Afro-Indians who came to India through the centuries, as merchants, mercenaries, travelers, and later, slaves of the Portuguese. Many served in important positions in the armies of several kingdoms, and some of them established the Habshi (Abyssinian) dynasty on the west coast of India and held Janjira State. There’s about 300,000 of them all over the west coast, with about 50,000 in Karnataka. The first time I came across them was an exhibit in the Museum of the African Diaspora, where they covered the African diaspora in several countries, and had a surprisingly large section dedicated to India. The descendents of the rulers of Janjira are still around to this day! This, too, goes into the collection of “Why didn’t they teach me these cool things at school?”.
GIF of the week: How this Japanese flip book uses negative space to tell a story.